La Dolce Vita. (12A.)
Directed by Federico Fellini. 1960.
Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimee, Alain Cuny, Yvonne Furneaux and Walter Santesso. Black and White. In Italian with subtitles. Available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection from October 18th. 174 mins.
La Dolce Vita is like a small boy romping around gleefully in a playpen while trying to tell you about his profound sense of ennui. Sixty years ago Fellini's sprawling epic about a smooth, suave, sophisticated, gutter journalist (Mastroianni) floating through the decadent circles of Roman society passed for a damning indictment of contemporary moral degradation. Seen today though, this long hot summer of chasing after film stars, going to parties and orgies, eating out on the Via Veneto and never going home before it gets light, looks very much like the time of your life.
Granted, swatting away all the paparazzi must've been tiring and the in-crowd could often be a bit of a bore, but to be young and impossibly handsome in 1960 must've been a hell of a thing, the kind of lightning strike of good fortune that happens maybe five or six times a century – and you still had The Beatles, mini skirts and the whole swinging decade to come. If the same film had been made in 1970 its sense of morass would be much more credible.
Scorsese describes it as "The film that conquered the world" and it was definitely a landmark film for Fellini, and Italy. (Among the extras Antonio Sarna suggests that it launched Rome as a modern European style capital.) It was a massive hit in North America and across Europe, though it can't be called his breakthrough. Fellini was already well established with two Best Foreign film Oscars to his name. It was though a giant leap in scale and the start of his miracle decade (Eight and a Half, Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon.) It also marked the shift from the comparatively well behaved, black and white realist films of the fifties, to the messy, badly behaved colour films that would earn him the "esque" suffix.
Dolce Vita is restrained compared to his later surreal colour films but for a basically realistic film, it is full of beautifully staged set-pieces. His take on the Eternal City is a large white vista of apartment blocks and building sites, a place of flux and change. And in the middle of it all is Mastroianni, working as Fellini's surrogate for the first time and already the master of fiddling with the placement of his sunglasses to get the maximum effect.
That said I could well imagine someone coming to it fresh in 2021 wondering what on earth the fuss was all about. About two years ago I tried watching it on the small screen and could barely stick with it or keep my eyes open. Then I saw it on the big screen, crisply restored, and it looked like a film that has retained every bit of its Wow over the passing of 60 years. Back on the small screen I'm not so sure. Its moralising seems a bit ridiculous now and objectively it is too long. It's made up of series of set pieces with very little connection and each one of them goes on well beyond its point. A modern editor could trim it down by at least a half-hour, probably more likely a quarter of the film, without damaging it. But then, what would be the point of a Dolce Vita that wasn't three hours long? The sprawl and indulgence is part of it.
New 4K digital restoration by The Film Foundation, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
Directed by Federico Fellini. 1960.
Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimee, Alain Cuny, Yvonne Furneaux and Walter Santesso. Black and White. In Italian with subtitles. Available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection from October 18th. 174 mins.
La Dolce Vita is like a small boy romping around gleefully in a playpen while trying to tell you about his profound sense of ennui. Sixty years ago Fellini's sprawling epic about a smooth, suave, sophisticated, gutter journalist (Mastroianni) floating through the decadent circles of Roman society passed for a damning indictment of contemporary moral degradation. Seen today though, this long hot summer of chasing after film stars, going to parties and orgies, eating out on the Via Veneto and never going home before it gets light, looks very much like the time of your life.
Granted, swatting away all the paparazzi must've been tiring and the in-crowd could often be a bit of a bore, but to be young and impossibly handsome in 1960 must've been a hell of a thing, the kind of lightning strike of good fortune that happens maybe five or six times a century – and you still had The Beatles, mini skirts and the whole swinging decade to come. If the same film had been made in 1970 its sense of morass would be much more credible.
Scorsese describes it as "The film that conquered the world" and it was definitely a landmark film for Fellini, and Italy. (Among the extras Antonio Sarna suggests that it launched Rome as a modern European style capital.) It was a massive hit in North America and across Europe, though it can't be called his breakthrough. Fellini was already well established with two Best Foreign film Oscars to his name. It was though a giant leap in scale and the start of his miracle decade (Eight and a Half, Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon.) It also marked the shift from the comparatively well behaved, black and white realist films of the fifties, to the messy, badly behaved colour films that would earn him the "esque" suffix.
Dolce Vita is restrained compared to his later surreal colour films but for a basically realistic film, it is full of beautifully staged set-pieces. His take on the Eternal City is a large white vista of apartment blocks and building sites, a place of flux and change. And in the middle of it all is Mastroianni, working as Fellini's surrogate for the first time and already the master of fiddling with the placement of his sunglasses to get the maximum effect.
That said I could well imagine someone coming to it fresh in 2021 wondering what on earth the fuss was all about. About two years ago I tried watching it on the small screen and could barely stick with it or keep my eyes open. Then I saw it on the big screen, crisply restored, and it looked like a film that has retained every bit of its Wow over the passing of 60 years. Back on the small screen I'm not so sure. Its moralising seems a bit ridiculous now and objectively it is too long. It's made up of series of set pieces with very little connection and each one of them goes on well beyond its point. A modern editor could trim it down by at least a half-hour, probably more likely a quarter of the film, without damaging it. But then, what would be the point of a Dolce Vita that wasn't three hours long? The sprawl and indulgence is part of it.
New 4K digital restoration by The Film Foundation, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New interview with filmmaker Lina Wertmüller, an assistant director on the film
- New interview with scholar David Forgacs about the period in Italian history when the film was made
- New interview with Italian journalist Antonello Sarno
- Interview with director Federico Fellini from 1965
- Audio interview with actor Marcello Mastroianni from the early 1960s
- Felliniana, a presentation of La dolce vita ephemera from the collection of Don Young
- New visual essay by filmmaker: : kogonada
- PLUS: An essay by critic Gary Giddins
